Zitat des Tages von Mary Gaitskill:
I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing.
Not being locked into one set of feelings, which you run the risk of mistaking for the truth, you have greater and more intense access to all feeling states, including those you would never choose to act out.
I had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful.
I wasn't ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, 'Why would I want to do that?'
The first person to blow up my fashion consciousness was a 14-year-old girl named Sandrine. She was the most beautiful human I had ever seen.
I used to start at about 10 at night and work until early morning. My preferred way to work is to start in the early afternoon and work until about 3, go do errands, have dinner, and then write for a few more hours in the evening.
One hot summer night in San Francisco, roughly 10 years ago, I was sitting in a crowded Pacific Heights restaurant when Alice Adams walked in with a man. She was about 60 at the time, and she was wearing a skirt that fell an inch or so above her knees and flat heels without stockings.
It's true that your environment influences how you write.
I believe that the truest parts of people can be buried, and for many different reasons.
The appeal of perfume is that it is at once ephemeral and empowering. It creates a shimmering invisible armor that lingers in a room long after its wearer has gone and infuses our imagination with a subtle power, hinting at a hidden identity.
People sometimes turn out to be almost the opposite of how they present. It isn't because they're trying to fool you or because they're hypocrites. It's because they badly want to be that thing, and so they'll try to be it.
Where I grew up, in the Detroit area, there was a really good station. Sometimes you would hear songs for the first time on the radio, and if a really special song came on, somebody would turn it up, and everybody would just stop talking.
I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.
I think that's the real reason, sometimes, that people talk about my stories as being scary, because if you compare what goes on in my stories to what goes on in popular movies and popular songs, it's very mild.
Something like riding a horse - which I've recently started doing - requires courage, especially for me, as I started out being actually scared of horses.
The hard truth is that there are people who believe they're writers and work hard at it and are sincere about it, but they don't make it. You have to be prepared for that possibility.
I loved to read and would read anything that roused my interest, whether it was below my age level or above it, even if I could barely make sense of it.
Between my hatred of mall shopping and my mother's firm ideas about how a girl should dress, my style choices were pretty unenthusiastic: plaid skirts or whatever empire-waisted thingamabob was on sale at Sears.
I think a lot of writing, or a lot of young writers, especially, hold themselves back unnecessarily because they're so upset about the idea that they might be sentimental or so concerned about being criticized that way or even being that way that they just shy away from any strong expression or emotion.
I had really wanted adventure. At the time that I ran away, lots of kids ran away from home. It was something of a social phenomenon.
Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet.
The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either.
At 16, I was in Toronto and very shy and not hanging around with anyone who was intellectual in the slightest, so I didn't really have the means to discuss what I was seeing and feeling.
If anything is scary about my writing, it's that it's the product of a very particular vision and doesn't reference common speech that heavily. By 'common speech,' I don't mean language as much as an agreed-on way of seeing, or a shorthand.
I didn't like horses when I was a kid.
I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it.
I don't think that the Internet creates feelings that aren't there, nor does it provide an outlet. On the contrary, what I have thought about things like computer games - what has disturbed me about them - is that they appear to stimulate feelings of aggression without providing any physical release.
Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially.
I remember back in the '90s, I used to feel criticized by women for not having children. Like there must be something wrong with me.
A sad person who is so involved with his sadness that he mistakes it for reality will have a hard time seeing himself as anything but sad. For him, the sadness is not a feeling that he experiences - it is him.
